Football and Politics

That the N.F.L. has ever been a politics-free zone is a fallacy. To the contrary, professional football has been suffused with politics for decades.

PHOTOGRAPH BY EZRA SHAW / GETTY

On a snowy Sunday afternoon in December, 1973, I went to visit two Chilean graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. With the covert support of the Nixon Administration, a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet had toppled Chile’s democratically elected leftist President, Salvador Allende, about two months earlier. I was going to write an article for the student newspaper about those grad students, both Allende supporters, who feared that they would be arrested or disappeared on their return home.

While we spoke, their attention kept drifting to an unexpected distraction: a small black-and-white TV tuned to the N.F.L. game between the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys. The grad students were fervently rooting for Dallas. When I asked why, I discovered they had no particular affinity for the Cowboys, a team quarterbacked by a Navy veteran, Roger Staubach, and owned by an oil magnate, Clint Murchison. It was simply that Dallas was the available cudgel to whack Washington, the team avidly embraced by Richard Nixon. The Cowboys’ 27–7 win that day supplied at least a tiny bit of payback for the geopolitical meddling that would upend their lives and inflict a murderous dictatorship on Chile.

That long-ago football game returned vividly to mind for me as this year’s Super Bowl, between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons, became a strikingly politicized event—from the pro-immigration commercials of Budweiser and 84 Lumber, among other companies, to the widely discussed friendship between President Trump and the Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft, and the murkier Trump contacts with the head coach, Bill Belichick, and the quarterback, Tom Brady.

Then, in the wake of the Patriots’ thrilling 34–28 overtime victory, six players, five of whom are African-American—Martellus Bennett, Devin McCourty, Dont’a Hightower, LeGarrette Blount, and Alan Branch—announced they would skip the team’s ceremonial visit to Trump at the White House. All this dissidence, of course, capped an N.F.L. season marked by the San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s weekly ritual of kneeling in protest during the national anthem.

In the diehard fans’ realm that the journalist Robert Lipsyte famously dubbed “Sportsworld,” such activism gets routinely criticized on the premise that politics should be kept out of sports, that sports should be the place where a polarized society can set aside its ideological differences to root for the home team. And when the athletic activist happens to be black, the critique often takes the racialized form of white fans demanding to know what some millionaire jock has to complain about.

To put things metrically, a nationwide survey last fall by Remington Research found that about two-thirds of respondents opposed professional football players using “the N.F.L. as a stage for their political views.” The number was markedly higher for men than women, whites than blacks, Republicans than Democrats, and conservatives than liberals.

The whole question, though, rests on a fallacy: that the N.F.L. has ever been a politics-free zone. To the contrary, professional football has been suffused with politics for decades. But because those politics so often tended to be conservative and pro-military, they looked to kindred fans like a normal, neutral baseline rather than an obvious skew.

As a sport, football cannot help evoking combat. Players wear elaborate armor. Terminology like “blitz” and “field general” borrows from the lexicon of war. Casualties are borne off the field of battle. And from the Vietnam War through the Iraq war, the N.F.L. has provided a few vivid examples of sacrifice and martyrdom. Rocky Bleier, a halfback on the great Pittsburgh Steelers team of the nineteen-seventies, was conscripted after his rookie year and suffered a severe injury in combat, earning him the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Pat Tillman, a defensive back on the Arizona Cardinals, enlisted after the September 11th attacks and was killed in a friendly-fire incident in Afghanistan.

Anyone who regularly watches or attends N.F.L. games takes for granted the military pageantry—flyovers by Air Force pilots, paratroopers descending to midfield, color guards presenting the flag. Less well-known is the fact that the Department of Defense paid about six million dollars to sixteen N.F.L. teams, between 2010 and 2015, to hold various salutes to the military. What appeared to most spectators to be sincere expressions of patriotism were actually advertisements and cross-branding.

Given the heady conflation of football, patriotism, and the military, it is no surprise that Richard Nixon, above all other Presidents, sought to leverage the sport for partisan and ideological advantage. During his 1968 campaign, Nixon considered Vince Lombardi, the iconic coach who had just retired from the Green Bay Packers, as a running mate. (In fact, Lombardi was a lifelong Democrat who had experienced prejudice as a dark-skinned Italian and supported gay players and staff on the Packers, in part because he had a gay brother.) When George Allen took over as head coach of the Redskins, in 1971, Nixon visited the team at practice to talk about General George Patton. He also, infamously, recommended an end-around play that lost thirteen yards in a game against the 49ers.

Between shooting wars, the culture wars often animated pro football. From the ubiquitous “John 3:16” banners held by fans to Tim Tebow’s end-zone prayers, the rhetoric and imagery of evangelical Christianity suffused both the stands and the field. However genuine these expressions of individual faith may have been, they also took place during the years when evangelical Christianity was asserting itself in partisan politics on such issues as abortion and gay rights.

Yet there has also been frequent pushback, a counternarrative, around the matter of race. Amid the Cold War’s battle for hearts and minds in the developing world, the Kennedy Administration felt sufficiently embarrassed by the Redskins’ deliberately all-white roster to pressure the team to sign a black player, Bobby Mitchell. Shortly before the kickoff of this year’s Super Bowl, the N.F.L. held an on-field ceremony honoring several dozen Hall of Fame players who had come from historically black colleges and universities.

They were introduced by Doug Williams, who was the first African-American quarterback to start and win a Super Bowl game, with the Redskins, in 1988. In breaking the quarterback color barrier in the N.F.L., pioneers like Williams, James Harris, and Marlin Briscoe shattered one of the pillars of racism: the assumption that blacks lacked the intelligence and character to be quarterbacks, or any other kinds of leaders.

Whatever attitudes N.F.L. fans may hold about affirmative action, the league operates on a highly successful version of it. The Rooney Rule requires that at least one black, Hispanic, Asian-American, or female candidate be interviewed for vacant top executive positions, including head coach and general manager. Without the rule, which was promulgated by a group of black former players and scouts, along with their legal allies, called the Fritz Pollard Alliance, it’s highly unlikely that some Super Bowl champion coaches, such as Mike Tomlin, of the Steelers, and general managers, such as Jerry Reese, of the Giants, ever would have been given a chance.

So Martellus Bennett, Devin McCourty, Dont’a Hightower, and the other Patriots who may join them in solidarity are hardly sullying the pristine, apolitical pastures of football. In defying a President with a long history of racist behavior—from discriminating against black tenants in his family’s real-estate empire, to calling for the execution of the falsely accused and wrongly convicted black teen-agers in the Central Park jogger case, to promoting the birther calumny against President Barack Obama—these players are just showing that in politics, as well as football, there are two sides to the field.

Samuel G. Freedman, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker’s Web site, is the author of seven books, including “Breaking The Line: The Year in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights.”

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